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Diamonds, it has long been said, are a girl's best friend. But a research team including a physicist from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has recently found* that the gems might turn out to be a patient's best friend as well.
The team's work has the long-term goal of developing quantum computers, but it has borne fruit that may have more immediate application in medical science. Their finding that a candidate "quantum bit" has great sensitivity to magnetic fields hints that MRI-like devices that can probe individual drug molecules and living cells may be possible.
The team's work has the long-term goal of developing quantum computers, but it has borne fruit that may have more immediate application in medical science. Their finding that a candidate "quantum bit" has great sensitivity to magnetic fields hints that MRI-like devices that can probe individual drug molecules and living cells may be possible.
© SOHO
Sunspot 1026:
One sunspot is not enough to end the deepest solar minimum in nearly a century, but you've got to start somewhere. "Finally, a new sunspot!" says Paul Maxson who sends this picture from his observatory in Surprise, Arizona.
Sunspot 1026 emerged yesterday to break a string of 19 consecutive spotless days. It's about as wide as Earth, which makes it an easy target for backyard solar telescopes. The Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) has measured the spot's magnetic polarity and identified it as a member of new Solar Cycle 24. Could this be a harbinger of more to come? (Apparently so.) Stay tuned.
American infants and toddlers watch TV an average of two hours a day, and much of the programming is billed as educational. A new study finds that children under age 3 learn less from these videos that we might think - unless there's an adult present to interact with them and support their learning.
The study, by researchers at Temple University and the University of Delaware, can be found in the September/October 2009 issue of the journal Child Development.
The researchers studied children who ranged in age from 30 to 42 months to explore whether they could learn the names of actions (verbs) from videos. The names of verbs are generally harder for children to learn than names of objects. Yet verb learning is critical because verbs are the centerpiece of sentences, the glue that holds the words together.
Using modified clips from the program Sesame Beginnings, the researchers showed children a video of characters performing unfamiliar actions that were labeled with new words (for example, "Look, she's daxing"). In some instances, the children watched without adult support, while in others, they watched with an adult who demonstrated the action that later appeared on the screen. The researchers then measured the children's ability to learn a new verb and apply that word to a new scene.
The study, by researchers at Temple University and the University of Delaware, can be found in the September/October 2009 issue of the journal Child Development.
The researchers studied children who ranged in age from 30 to 42 months to explore whether they could learn the names of actions (verbs) from videos. The names of verbs are generally harder for children to learn than names of objects. Yet verb learning is critical because verbs are the centerpiece of sentences, the glue that holds the words together.
Using modified clips from the program Sesame Beginnings, the researchers showed children a video of characters performing unfamiliar actions that were labeled with new words (for example, "Look, she's daxing"). In some instances, the children watched without adult support, while in others, they watched with an adult who demonstrated the action that later appeared on the screen. The researchers then measured the children's ability to learn a new verb and apply that word to a new scene.
Visually impaired or blind patients with degenerative retina conditions would be very happy if they were able to regain mobility, find their way around, be able to lead an independent life and to recognize faces and read again. These wishes were documented by a survey conducted by a research team ten years ago to find out what patients' expectations of electronic retina prostheses (retina implants) were.
Today these wishes look set to become reality, as the presentations to be given at the international symposium "Artificial Vision" on 19 September 2009 at the Wissenschaftszentrum Bonn demonstrate. The symposium is being staged by the Retina Implant Foundation and the Pro Retina Stiftung zur Verhütung von Blindheit (Pro Retina Foundation for the Prevention of Blindness), a foundation of the patients' organization Pro Retina Deutschland e.V.
Today these wishes look set to become reality, as the presentations to be given at the international symposium "Artificial Vision" on 19 September 2009 at the Wissenschaftszentrum Bonn demonstrate. The symposium is being staged by the Retina Implant Foundation and the Pro Retina Stiftung zur Verhütung von Blindheit (Pro Retina Foundation for the Prevention of Blindness), a foundation of the patients' organization Pro Retina Deutschland e.V.
Imaging studies along with diagnostic codes on medical charts show that the rate of strokes in infants and children is two to four times higher than commonly thought, researchers report in Stroke: Journal of the American Heart Association.
"Traditional methods using diagnostic codes work fairly well to identify stroke in studies on adults, but they miss a large proportion of cases when applied to infants and children," said Heather J. Fullerton, M.D., senior author of the study and associate professor of neurology at the University of California, San Francisco (USCF).
The inaccurate count occurs because some coders aren't use to applying stroke codes to children or are due to typing errors.
Suspecting that childhood strokes might be under-counted in research based on diagnostic codes alone, researchers from UCSF analyzed the records of 2.3 million children from 0 - 19 years old enrolled in the Kaiser Permanente managed care plan in Northern California from1993 - 2003.
"Traditional methods using diagnostic codes work fairly well to identify stroke in studies on adults, but they miss a large proportion of cases when applied to infants and children," said Heather J. Fullerton, M.D., senior author of the study and associate professor of neurology at the University of California, San Francisco (USCF).
The inaccurate count occurs because some coders aren't use to applying stroke codes to children or are due to typing errors.
Suspecting that childhood strokes might be under-counted in research based on diagnostic codes alone, researchers from UCSF analyzed the records of 2.3 million children from 0 - 19 years old enrolled in the Kaiser Permanente managed care plan in Northern California from1993 - 2003.
© GoogleGoogle has revealed that its alien-themed doodles are a tribute to author HG Wells, who wrote 'War of the Worlds'
For weeks, web users have speculated about the meaning of Google's mysterious doodles. The first appeared on September 5, and showed a flying saucer hovering over the Google logo and "abducting" the letter "O". Google issued a teaser message on its Twitter account, which translated as "All your O belong to us", a nod to Zero Wing, a cult Japanese video game. Clicking on the logo took web users through to a page of search results for the term "unexplained phenomenon".
© Luis Jaime Castillo ButtersA gilded mask found on the floor of a pre-Inca Mache tomb in Peru is similar to another one affixed to a nearby coffin
Surrounded by early "smoke machines" as well as human and llama bones, the body was among several buried inside a unique double-chambered tomb that dates back to A.D. 850, said archaeologist Luis Jaime Castillo Butters, of the Catholic University of Peru in Lima.
© iStockphoto/John HakThe main pyramid at Mayapan
Together with an Anglo-American team, an ETH Zurich researcher has studied the most recent deposits that filled the crater. The results provide accurate dating of the limestones and a valuable basis for archaeologists to research the Maya.
The discovery of the Chicxulub asteroid crater was detective work: in 1980, based on iridium anomalies in clay sediments - which could only be formed extraterrestrially - the American physicist Walter Alvarez postulated a devastating asteroid impact at the transition from the Cretaceous to the Paleogene around 65 million years ago.
© NASA
The tangle of hot, magnetized plasma circled above almost certainly overlies a large new-cycle sunspot. We'll soon find out. The sun's rotation is turning the active region toward Earth and it could pop over the sun's eastern limb as early as Sept. 21st. Readers with solar telescopes are encouraged to monitor developments.
